Why Motörhead's Lemmy Was the Bleeding Heart of Rock N' Roll

Yesterday, cancer did what a half-century of hard living and an ungodly amount of substance abuse couldn't, which was to stop the beating heart of the man who was himself the beating heart of rock 'n' roll.

The very idea of whether Lemmy Kilmister, one-time bassist for psych rock band Hawkwind and leader of metal pioneers Motörhead, was actually killable had long been a subject of debate among rock aficionados. As far as anyone could tell, he was indestructible. At its peak, his average daily intake of Jack Daniels and/or speed and/or basically any other abuse-able substance within arm's reach could easily have killed a normal human being. He didn't seem to appreciably age after 1979. It was widely taken for granted that after whatever apocalypse ended life on Earth as we know it, all that would be left roaming the planet would be roaches and Lemmy. My old roommate had a theory that the warts on Lemmy's face produced new Lemmys when the old ones wore out, rendering him immortal.

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He may not have been god, but people worshipped him. For better or worse, his herculean feats of substance abuse made him the idol to many. Others deified him for his philosophy towards stage volume: "Everything louder than everything else". But other bands were just as loud, and other musicians did as many drugs. What set Lemmy apart from all of them, and what made him so important to rock 'n' roll, was his sense of completeness.

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Aside from women, who he enjoyed in vast quantities, he didn't have much interest in the usual accouterments of rock stardom. He didn't care about clothes. He didn't care about mainstream celebrity. He lived in a shitty apartment in Hollywood and spent his downtime downing Jack-and -cokes and playing touchscreen bar video games. His one material extravagance was collecting Nazi memorabilia, which, yes, is problematic, but from all appearances stemmed more from being a history buff than a white supremacist.

Lemmy was monomaniacally obsessed with rock, specifically hard, fast, stripped-down stuff with no room for fancying shit up, and everything else could pretty much fuck off. Maybe his most important quality as a rock star was the fact that all he really needed out of life was a gig and a rider with a couple bottles of whiskey. You get the idea that if his fortunes had gone differently he would have been content living out life playing shitty dives instead of stadiums.

In the surprisingly affecting 2011 documentary Lemmy: 49% Motherf**ker, 51% Son Of A Bitch, there's a bit where Metallica is in town and they've invited Lemmy to join them on stage at whatever EnormoDome they're booked in. Lemmy arrives for rehearsal with bass in hand, no entourage or personal roadies, and the camera follows him as he wanders the endless corridors underneath the arena looking for where he's supposed to join the band. Someone finally guides him to the practice space that Metallica has set up backstage, a complete rehearsal room stocked with a whole set of gear separate from what they'll be playing on later–an additional extravagance piled on an already extravagant situation. The band seems stoked on the setup, but the baffled look on Lemmy's face as he takes it in speaks to how unnecessarily indulgent it is, and how far it really is from being the cool little practice space–just like what real, authentic struggling rockers would play in–the band thinks it is.

In the next scene they show him on stage just utterly wiping the floor with the members of Metallica. They clearly understand that he's the real deal on a level they haven't been able to touch in decades, and the look on their faces as they bask in his presence is pure bliss.